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2020 Transcendence in Infinite Jest | arpon raksit

Transcendence in In nite Jest

 November 

Introduction
One needs only reach the twelfth page of In nite Jest to be confronted
with philosophy: Hal’s very rst utterances express his beliefs that “the
in uence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated”, that “Hobbes is just
Rousseau in a dark mirror”, and “with Hegel, that transcendence is
absorption”. It is my belief that these statements are not simply supercilious
name-dropping (either on Hal’s or David Foster Wallace’s part), but serious
hints that central aspects of the novel should be understood in a
philosophical context. This essay works towards justifying this belief using
(a few of) the remaining pages of the text, speci cally focusing on this
notion of transcendence which Hal immediately refers to.
The notion of transcendence takes on many forms throughout
philosophy, but I think two are most relevant to understanding its form in
the novel. First we have the transcendence of existential philosophy, in
particular of Jean Paul Sartre, which is the human’s freedom and
responsibility to actively relate to, rather than be passively determined by,
its facticity, the physical, social, and historical facts which constitute it as an
object in the world. Second we have transcendentalist philosophy, which
stresses the power of the isolated individual to transcend the conformity of
society, and is in part inspired by Immanuel Kant’s concept of the
individual’s “transcendental” a priori knowledge.
In what follows I argue that we may understand In nite Jest’s philosophy
of transcendence through the concept’s existential and transcendental
manifestations, and then apply this understanding to shed a bit of light on
the mystery of two characters in the novel, Lyle and Hal.

Transcendence
To give grounds for the relevance of existential philosophy in the novel it
su ces to consider the story at its highest level (both geographically and
conceptually), namely in Marathe and Steeply’s discussion on America. At
the center of their discourse is “freedom! … as if it were obvious to all
people what it wants to mean, this word. But look: it is not so simple as
that. Your freedom is the freedom-from … But what of the freedom-to? Not
just free-from. … How for the person to freely choose?” (  ). Marathe’s
questions here t very nicely into the framework of existentialism,
articulating Sartre’s conception of transcendence, that human freedom is a
responsibility, condition, and limitation in relating to the world.
We can interpret Marathe’s “freedom-from” the world as the simplest
form of transcending facticity, understanding one’s right to choose. Then
his “freedom-to” act, what he suggests is the far more critical and di cult

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aspect of freedom, can be interpreted as actually applying this right to relate

with the facticity of the world. The novel depicts the result of only
exercising the former, easier end of freedom as an ironic loss of freedom:
addiction, either to drugs or the Entertainment. The viewers who become
“stuck”, “trapped in some sort of middle”, “lost” ( ) in the
Entertainment forego their role as actors in the world, and hence are
reduced to objects in the world, their facticity. This intimates one of In nite
Jest’s many double-binds: one cannot hide from the facticity of the world in
transcending one’s facticity.
But the novel moreover suggests that solving this existential double-bind
of transcendence lies in another form of transcendence, namely
transcendence of the self. This is expressed most clearly by Schtitt’s basically
fascist philosophy of tennis:
Tennis’s beauty’s in nite roots are self-competitive. You compete with
your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution.
Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve:
win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve
and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and
transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the
rst place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the
same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to
be killed and mourned, over and over again. ( )
Here transcendence is positioned as antithetical to transcendentalism. The
“limits” one must transcend do not come from society but from “within”
the self. This opposition to transcendentalism is made explicit when Pemulis
tries to convince Hal to take DMZ by saying that the “stu ’s original intent
was to induce what they called quote transcendent experiences in get this
chronic alcoholics”, and Hal asks in clari cation, “Was it transcendent?
The term in Struck’s literature? Or was it transcendental?” Pemulis shrugs
o the di erence but his next choice of words is: “some low-risk
transcendentalism with me and the Human Hatchet could be…” ( ).
This suggests that the novel attributes the degenerative spiral of addicted,
“freedom-from” behavior into static facticity to a type of transcendentalist
worship of the power and rights of the individual. Schtitt’s transcendence is
instead about “vanquish[ing]” the boundaries of the individual, embracing
the “freedom-to” give oneself up to “[s]omething bigger than the self”, as
Marathe says ( ).
Schtitt’s mention of the in nite and emphasis on the self as a limit
indicate a crucial link between transcendence and in nity in the text. One
such link is in the grammatical sense of the word in nite—as in a verb form
not limited by tense, person, or number—which seems to re ect Schtitt’s
notion of transcendence, of partaking in something that is not restricted by
some speci c subject or time, or that “outlives you” ( ). Another link lies
in Avril’s proposal that: “There are, apparently, persons who are deeply
afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret,
sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as
afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and

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thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become in nite and
engulf them” ( ). So perhaps Schtitt’s “human State” can be interpreted
as simply the human state, i.e. the emotion and sentiment which connects
one to others. This is reinforced by “Hal, who’s empty but not dumb,
theoriz[ing] privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of
sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be
really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably
sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in
some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-
looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet
eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool” ( – ). This last
description immediately brings Mario to mind, which ts given Mario’s
close relationship with Schtitt, complete devotion to and love of his family,
and that he is “not exactly insensitive when it comes to people” ( ).
The above evinces the following picture of transcendence in In nite Jest:
the self is a boundary between and limit of the in nity of sentiment within
and the in nity of the world without, and true transcendence is the
transcendence of this boundary, the ability to interface honestly with the
world. This transcendence involves both recognizing the inner in nity—
transcending one’s facticity as a human being with attitudes and feelings—
and the outer in nity—turning one’s transcendence on the other facticities
of the world, connecting to the human s/State. This sits in contradistinction
to trascendentalism, which the novel depicts not as the erasure of this
boundary or transcendence of this limit, but as a false, ironic rejection of
the inner emotion and pure consumption (or ingestion) of the outer world.

Lyle
While In nite Jest’s philosophy of transcendence is best verbally expressed
by Schtitt, I believe it is best embodied by Lyle, whose mystery is apparent
from his rst description:
An oiled guru sits in yogic full lotus in Spandex and tank top. He’s
maybe forty. He’s in full lotus on top of the towel dispenser just above
the shoulder-pull station in the weight room of the En eld Tennis
Academy, En eld MA. … Nobody knows where he comes from or why
he’s allowed to stay, but he’s always in there, sitting yogic about a meter
o the rubberized oor of the weight room. His tank top says
TRANSCEND in silkscreen; on the back it’s got DEUS PROVIDEBIT in
Day-Glo orange. … This guru lives o the sweat of others. Literally.
The uids and salts and fatty acids. He’s like a beloved nut. He’s an
E.T.A. institution.
If his tank top is not enough of a visual hint at his embodiment of
transcendence, his being a yogic guru described as if oating in lotus
position above the ground must be; and if it isn’t, the fact that he later
literally “hovers cross-legged just a couple mm. above the top of the towel
dispenser in the unlit weight room, eyes rolled up white” ( ) undoubtedly
is.

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But his transcendence runs far deeper than these images. His entire role
at E.T.A. is to connect with others: “Like all good listeners, he has a way of
attending that is at once intense and assuasive: the supplicant feels both
nakedly revealed and sheltered, somehow, from all possible judgment. It’s
like he’s working as hard as you. You both of you, brie y, feel unalone”
( ). This precisely describes his ability to transcend the boundary
between his self and his “supplicant”. He lives for and o of (the sweat of)
the other. And most strikingly, he is not an individual, but an “institution”.
In light of this I want to interpret a couple of perplexing details about
Lyle. The rst is his advice to Ortho Stice: “Do not underestimate objects!
Lyle says he nds it impossible to overstress this: do not underestimate
objects” ( ). This re ects the idea that in transcending one’s facticity, one
must not disregard facticity all together; i.e. one must actively relate to the
objects in the world to avoid getting lost in the self. This then supports the
idea that the unexplained misplacement of objects in E.T.A., including
Stice’s bed, are an attempt by James Incandenza to draw Hal out of his self,
to have Hal actually open himself to the world and its objects. The second
is the fact that the back of Lyle’s “TRANSCEND” tank top reads “DEUS
PROVIDEBIT”, i.e. “GOD WILL PROVIDE”. This hints at the signi cance
of faith and worship in the novel’s conception of transcendence. This is
expressed by Marathe as well: “Our attachments are our temple, what we
worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.” Lyle’s
position as an essentially religious guru points at the idea that connection
between one’s honest emotions and the in nity of the human s/State outside
the self relies on an essentially religious faith in some sort of god.

Hal
Finally we turn to Hal. These days the term “existential angst” evokes the
image of a clichéd sullen teenager lying in bed in a dark room, clichéd
melancholy alternative rock drowning out clichéd parental yelling through
the door. Maybe Hal isn’t so extremely clichéd but he’s still a teenager
wrestling with the idea that “inside [him] there’s pretty much nothing at all,
he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks
what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the
limit, lately: he is lonely” ( ). While it would be easy to cynically cast
aside this emptiness and loneliness as teenage naivete, In nite Jest suggests
that “the cliché ‘I don’t know who I am’ unfortunately turns out to be more
than a cliché” ( ), and should be considered in the light of the serious
philosophy from which existential angst originated.
Indeed, I claim that Hal’s driving struggle in the novel is the classic
existential struggle of transcending one’s facticity. Hal speci cally faces the
facticity of genetics and authority: as a “lexical prodigy” he is simply an
echo of his mother, and as “late-blooming prodigy and possible genius at
tennis” he is simply an echo of his father. Rather than actively forming his
identity he is “being encouraged to identify himself” through these echoes,
acting apparently exclusively to make his mother and in fact “every
authority- gure in his world and beyond very proud indeed” ( ). Hal’s

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father (as the professional conversationalist) pleads that Hal “recognize the
occasional vista beyond your own generous Mondragonoid nose’s eshy
tip” ( )—Mondragon being Avril’s maiden name—indicating that Hal
only sees his mother in front of him, or perhaps only interacts with the
world as ltered through his mother. This lack of identity is what gives
truth for Hal to “the fact that that the great transcendent horror is
loneliness, excluded encagement in the self” ( ); he perceives his self only
as a cage of facticity which he is unable to break free of, transcend.
This is why the sudden shift from third- to rst-person narration of Hal
( ) is so pivotal; and why it is so important in the opening scene of the
novel that Hal believes, “I am in here” ( ); and why Hal is desperate to
communicate:
I am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history.
Experiences and feelings. I’m complex. … it transcends the mechanics.
I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. … I’m not just a creātus,
manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function. ( - )
The mechanics and conditioning he “transcends” are precisely his facticity.
The tragedy then is that, though he now “feel[s] and believe[s]” in his
identity, he “cannot make himself understood” ( ): “I look out. Directed
my way is horror. … ‘I am not what you see and hear.’” ( – ). Given the
analysis above, Hal’s inability to communicate his feelings with others
indicates that he has not truly transcended. While Lyle is able to bridge the
in nities within and without him, transcend himself to become an
“institution” with which others honestly connect, Hal remains stuck in his
nitude, unable to connect.
This is the real (but not unsatisfying) sense for me in which In nite Jest
does not nish: we are left with an incompletely transformed,
untranscended Hal, one which re ects the deep loneliness in the incredible
di culty of both recognizing the in nity within the self and transcending
the boundary (the self) between this in nity and the in nities of others.

. All page references are to: David Foster Wallace, In nite Jest, Back Bay Books,
.↩

thanks for reading,

more writing here.
— arpon

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